Updating YDB version on clusters deployed with Ansible

During the initial deployment, the Ansible playbook provides several options for selecting the YDB server executable (ydbd). This article explains the available options for changing the cluster's version after the initial deployment.

Update executables via Ansible playbook

The ydb-ansible repository contains a playbook called ydb_platform.ydb.update_executable that can be used to upgrade or downgrade a YDB cluster to another version. Navigate to the same directory used for the initial deployment, edit inventory/50-inventory.yaml to specify the target YDB version to install (typically, via the ydb_version or ydb_git_version variables), and then run this playbook:

ansible-playbook ydb_platform.ydb.update_executable

The playbook obtains a new binary and then deploys it to the cluster via Ansible's cross-server copying. After that, it performs a rolling restart.

Filter by node type

Tasks in the ydb_platform.ydb.update_executable playbook are tagged with node types, so you can use Ansible's tags functionality to filter nodes by their kind.

These two commands are equivalent and will change the configuration of all storage nodes:

ansible-playbook ydb_platform.ydb.update_executable --tags storage
ansible-playbook ydb_platform.ydb.update_executable --tags static

These two commands are equivalent and will change the configuration of all database nodes:

ansible-playbook ydb_platform.ydb.update_executable --tags database
ansible-playbook ydb_platform.ydb.update_executable --tags dynamic

Skip restart

There's a no_restart tag to only deploy the executable files and skip the cluster restart. This might be useful if the cluster will be restarted later manually or as part of some other maintenance tasks. Example:

ansible-playbook ydb_platform.ydb.update_executable --tags no_restart